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Recent
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April
3, 2003
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
April
2, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Politics of Casualties
David
Lindorff
Making America Safer...for Iraqi
Fighters
William
Blum
Some Observations on the Recent Behavior of the Empire
Gustavio
Sierra
The Morning After the Slaughter at
Nasser
Patrick
Cockburn
Playing Into Saddam's Hands
Robert
Jensen
Peter Arnett: Whipping Boy of the
Pentagon
Jeremy
Brecher
Uniting for Peace Update
N.D.
Jayaprakash
The Siege of Basra
LaDawn
Haglund
You Can Jail the Resisters, But You
Can't Arrest the Resistance
Robert
Fisk
Truth and Subterfuge
Jemima
Khan
I'm Ashamed to be British
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
Stew Albert
Total War
Website
of the Day
Traitor List: Sign Up Now!
April
1, 2003
Jason
Leopold
Rumsfeld: "Get Me Rewrite"
William
S. Lind
The Pitfalls of War Planning
Jorge
Mariscal
Latinos on the Frontlines, Again
Paul
de Rooij
Arrogant Propaganda
Jo
Wilding
From Baghdad: "I Am His Mother"
Tarif
Abboushi
Operation Embedded Folly
Lee
Sustar
Labor's War at Home
Akiva Eldar
Israeli Dreams of Iraqi Oil
Bernard
Weiner
The Vietnam Connection
Robert
Fisk
The Graveyard at Baghdad's North
Gate
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/01
Website
of the Day
A Collectible War
March
31, 2003
David
Lindorff
Liberating Iraqis from Their Homes
Neve Gordon
A Different Kind of Despair
John
Chuckman
Absurdities and Contradictions
Ron Jacobs
Bernie Sanders Voting Maybe on
War
Wayne
Madsen
The Siege of Washington
Mark Franchetti
Slaughter at the Bridge of Death
Robert
Fisk
Blood and Bandages of the Innocent
Robin Cook
Send Our Soldiers Home
Anthony
Gancarski
Investigate Perle
Uri Avnery
The Devil's Dictionary
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 03/31
March
29, 2003
Kathy and
Bill Christison
"Like Being Autistic with
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Ben
Tripp
"My Empire for a Map!": Geography
American Style
Ann Harrison
The War on Protesters: San Francisco's
Berserk Cops
Kurt
Nimmo
Dead People: Don't Go There
Chris Floyd
Blood on the Tracks: Cheney the
War Profiteer
Ann
Pettifer
Israelis: Victims No Longer?
Jo Wilding
Dispatch from Baghdad: Nowhere
is Safe
Ramzy
Baroud
Horror Chamber: Inside the Al-Amiriya
Shelter
David Krieger
Perle is Gone, But the Looting
Continues
John
Gershman
Dreams of Empire; Eulogies for International
Law
Robert
Fisk
Bombing the Phone System
Brice Abel
War, Bush and the Jesus Torilla
Tom
Stephens
The Chickenhawk Circle of Hell
Alexander
Cockburn
"War Not Going According
to Plan"
March 28,
2003
Robert
Fisk
Bitter Truths About Basra
Daniel
Wolff
A Road Trip in Wartime
Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
David Lindorff
Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
Tristam
Icarus on Crack: American Hubris
and Iraq
Jason Leopold
Richard Perle: the Enterprising
Hawk
Saul
Landau
Technological Massacre
Carol Norris
The Mother of All Bombs
Riad
Abdelkarim, MD
Iraq War Lingo 101
Adam Engel
Schlock and Awe
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
March 27,
2003
Anthony
Gancarski
Somebody Blew Up Baghdad
Rahul
Mahajan
The New Humanitarianism: Basra as
Military Target
Simon Jones
A Letter from Uzbekistan
William
S. Lind
No Exit
Diane Christian
A Day of Reckoning
The
Black Commentator
Onward
Embedded Soldiers: the Press and the War
Mickey
Z.
Remembering the Real Moynihan:
Genocide in East Timor
Richard
Thieme
The Problem of Empathy
Jason Leopold
Energy Scams: Bilking California
Out of Billions
Tariq
Ali
A Naked Display of Imperial Power
Alexander
Cockburn
Up the Creek
March 26,
2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch
Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning
Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets
of Blood
Patrick
Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs,
Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert
Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A
Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria
Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The
Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25,
2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What
Democracy Looks Like: the Streets of Cairo
Bill and
Kathleen Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why
Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings
on the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood
Indicator: Casualties and the Stock Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless
Country
March 24,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers
at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The
Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How
to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony
Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We
Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other
America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood
for Oil: the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint
Them Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic
Protest for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Jo Wilding
From
Waiting to War: a Day and a Night in Baghdad
Stephen Banko
I Was
a Soldier Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did
We Become an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert
Jensen
Myths
and Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come
On Democrats, Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch
from Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
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April 4,
2003
Into the Führerbunker!
The End of the
Innocence
By TOM STEPHENS
"After the war starts, you anti-war
demonstrators are going to support our troops and our president,
aren't you?"
unidentified "coed" student
Oakland University teach-in on the war with Iraq, March 10, 2003
"In February 1943, after Stalingrad,
the whole mood in the Führer's bunker changed very suddenly."
Traudl Junge, former personal secretary
to Adolf Hitler, in the 2002 movie Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary
Traudl Junge (literally "youngster,"
auf Deutsch) was 22 years old when she won a typing contest in
Berlin. "Fortunately," she says 60 years later in her
filmed interview/ confession, ("or unfortunately, as things
turned out"), the prize was the opportunity of working at
Hitler's side until the end of World War II. She says she was
feeding the Goebbels' six young children butter and marmalade
sandwiches for lunch at the very moment, almost three years later,
when she heard the fatal shot that ended her boss's immeasurably
and incomprehensibly evil life. A wide-eyed, innocent young woman
had wanted to be a dancer in 1942. That girl didn't know about
the reality of her employer's acts. Many years later in the 1960s,
when books like The Diary of Anne Frank were published in Germany,
the 81-year old woman on camera learned some hard lessons. Mesmerized
in a crowded movie theater as her very personal and political
life story unfolded on film sixty years later, I thought "Thank
God for the sixties."
What is happening in America today? An
almost unbelievably fresh-faced naiveté and utter sincerity
seemed to be fairly bursting out of the voice and demeanor of
the young Michigan college student quoted above. From all appearances
she couldn't even imagine any other possible position, after
the president announced that the war had "begun," than
"support our troops." Today she must be almost exactly
the same age as Traudl Junge, when the latter accepted her prestigious
position as Hitler's new stenographer. She was responding to
the presentation that Wayne State University Professor Fran Shor
and I had just given at the Oakland University "dialog"
on the then-impending US invasion and intensified bombing of
Iraq. Fran talked mostly about the current US government neoconservatives'
lust for conquering an empire. I focused on the burgeoning international
peace movement. We both tried to answer her short, momentous
question. Then she immediately walked out of the large, crowded
room, so there was no opportunity for any further dialog with
her at that time.
What is happening in America today? It
seems to me we are collectively facing a loss of innocence. Our
innocence was carefully cultivated by the administrations of
Ronald Reagan and George Bush's father. Their top officials are
now in charge again, rampaging toward a fundamentalist "rapture"
bathed in the blood of their countless victims. Or perhaps we
are on the cusp of a comprehensively militarized, one-party corporate
national security state. Maybe both a loss of innocence and a
pre-fascist state. This government's top officials, like good
National Socialists, seek to totally identify the interests and
affairs of the nation with their personal political ambitions.
They seriously threaten to drag the rest of us into the abyss.
Under Dubyah's father and his cowboy/actor
role model Ronald Reagan, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Don
Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams and their ilk carefully
prepared their wars to avoid excessive American bloodshed. Now
the Rubicon has been crossed. We're not in Grenada any more,
Toto. Their Boy Emperor has begun to use the word "sacrifice"
in public. At the very bitter end, with Russian artillery shells
slamming down on the 8 foot thick concrete above their heads
in the Führerbunker, Goebbels' doomed little Helmut heard
the shot from the other room and exclaimed "That was a direct
hit."
"Better stop children, what's that
sound? Everybody look what's goin' down." Indeed.
Sometimes People (and monsters named
Dick, George, Donald, or Adolf walking the Earth in human form)
will say one thing, but do another. Their words "Operation
Iraqi Freedom" lead directly to their barbaric acts. Starving
and incinerating little Iraqi children. Sending barely older
American youngsters thousands of miles away to kill and die for
an empire. We started to lose our innocence Big Time -
on September 11. The mega- billion dollar military psyops - endlessly
repeated "God Bless America" and "United We Stand"
- helped preserve our sense of innocence, very imperfectly but
providing some sense of comfort if we just remained unthinkingly
loyal to the leader of the nation.
Gulf War II turned from Gulf War I into
Vietnam, less than 72 hours after the "tip of the spear"
crossed the Kuwaiti border. Now we can see. Not only wasn't it
about the laughable, utterly fabricated "threat" Saddam
posed to us before we invaded Iraq. Not only wasn't it about
the elusive weapons of mass destruction that Blair has been bemoaning,
and the UN has been wrangling over, for months. Not only wasn't
it about liberating the Iraqis, many if whom are fighting their
US "liberators" with suicidal fury. No, it was and
is about getting the soldiers and the American People to acquiesce
in a bloody, imperial oil war. The Marines in Iraq now have a
perfectly common sense credo, based on the terrible position
they have been put in by their leaders: "Be polite. Be professional.
But have a plan to kill everyone you meet." The perfect
start for a campaign to democratize the Arab world.
"Hitler would always say, 'Trust
me, don't even think about it, I'll take responsibility,'"
The widow Junge reminisced. "That's the evil, when the whole
Volk surrender their conscience to the will of a single leader."
Now it is again about an enormous, insane project of barbaric
acts. Employing 21st century mass slaughter technology against
the People of Iraq (like the People of Afghanistan before them)
to conquer and occupy Arab oil lands, to project US power throughout
Eurasia, and to achieve permanent full spectrum dominance of
the world. We can partly see it on TV even through the garbled
nonsense of the networks' promotion of the war. And it is literally,
truly a matter of absolute life and death for many, many of our
fellow human beings, including for many of our fellow Americans.
Consider the simple fact that a conservative,
suburban commuter college like Oakland University even hosted
a teach-in about the war with Iraq, in that era of previous human
history three weeks ago, before the doctrine of preventive US
war against allegedly terrorist-associated Arab evil was fully
set in motion. By far the majority of this war's consequences
are still unknown. Yet even "before the war" hundreds
of these relatively innocent young American students in a very
mainstream institution were already discussing the demerits of
the Perle/Cheney/ Rumsfeld/ Wolfowitz war policy. They had to
reschedule the "dialog" from late February, so they
could find a fairly conservative professor to present the US
government's perspective. Isn't the very occurrence of such an
event in such a setting, compared to Cold War McCarthyism and
the relatively much later organizing of the Mobilization to End
the War in Vietnam, in and of itself a sure sign of some metaphorical
"loss of innocence" affecting the whole American Volk?
We know what genocide and aggressive
war are. We learned about them in the history books. Now we have
seen them in nearly real time TV, and they are likely to continue
for some time, because there is no power on Earth sufficient
to immediately control or recall the violent forces that have
been set loose. Some of us won't admit it is genocide yet. Some
of them won't admit it ever. Frau Junge never did talk explicitly
about what happened to the six doomed Goebbels children who'd
recently moved into the bunker to be near Uncle Hitler (presumably
they were given cyanide in the pretext of a "vaccination").
The filmmakers didn't ask directly about that. Some things, under
some circumstances, you just can't talk about.
Hundreds of thousands of young Americans
are now committed to an extremely risky, "desert lite"
battle plan. At least one suicide bomber has already killed several
of them. There is an almost universally recognized probability
of further deadly terrorist attacks, directed largely against
these now-vulnerable, heavily armed Americans, and probably against
other targets of opportunity as well. We are gradually losing
our innocence about what George W. Bush's government is really
doing to the world in our name. Our economy is stumbling. "The
system" again, as in the Vietnam era, faces the distinct
possibility of losing the loyalty of a generation of young People
whom its leaders seek to use as pawns in their obscene and mass-murderous
geopolitical power game.
Figure out where you stand regarding
the Mobilization to End the War in Iraq (Iran, Syria, North Korea
etc.). Please help. Don't surrender your individual conscience.
If you are scared and overwhelmed, recognize that this is a rational
response to evil government policies. If you want to beat up
anti-war protestors you probably stopped reading before you even
started this essay, but if not please ask yourself why you feel
that way, and whether it may be partly because America is losing
its innocence, and we are living in a pre-fascist state.
If you think that the fact the nation
is at war means that the People must automatically obey whatever
the government leader says, please ask yourself why. Stop and
think about where political authority supposedly comes from in
our democracy, where the first 3 words of the nation's constitution
are "We the People." Turn off the damn TV and search
the internet for information about the war with Iraq. Question
authority. Read A People's History of the United States, by Howard
Zinn. Noam Chomsky's bestseller 9-11(or just about anything else
he's written). For an understanding of the roots of terrorism
and the evils of imperialism, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of
the Earth. Go to a teach-in, public meeting, or demonstration,
and stick around to share your thoughts and feelings with your
fellow citizens and others. After you lose innocence, accurate
information becomes much more useful and important. It serves
as a kind of "force multiplier" against politicians'
and corporations'lies.
After you lose innocence, you need morality
to guide your actions. America has lost its innocence. America
needs morality to keep the Bush administration from hauling it
into a Führerbunker. America needs its young People to lead
it back to sanity, democracy, freedom and social justice. Again.
Thank God for the sixties.
Tom Stephens
is a lawyer in Detroit, Michigan. He can be reached at lebensbaum4@earthlink.
Today's
Features
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
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